Master of His Fate James Tobin (free e books to read online .txt) 📖

wheelchair invalid incapable of meeting the physical ordeals of the Presidential Office,” wrote a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and indeed, “the governor gives the impression of a man in excellent physical condition, capable of meeting as strenuous campaigning as anyone else.”

As the people watched FDR, he was watching them. Shortly after the trip, at the townhouse in New York, he chatted with a small circle of family and associates over dinner. He was thinking about the faces he had seen in the West.

“They are the faces of people in want,” he said. “I don’t mean the unemployed alone. Of course, they would take anything. I mean those who still have jobs and don’t know how long they’ll last. They have the frightened look of lost children. And I don’t mean physical want alone. There is something more … a kind of yearning—‘We’re caught in something we don’t understand; perhaps this fellow can help us out.’”

He won, of course, and in the terrible winter that followed, he prepared to assume the presidency.

He had been courageous, but as with anyone, his courage was not the absence of fear. On the night before his inauguration at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 1933, he told his son Jimmy that he needed Jimmy’s prayers, since he wasn’t sure he was strong enough for the job.

Then, the next day, under lowering clouds at the U.S. Capitol, before one hundred thousand spectators, he walked to the rostrum, took the constitutional oath of office, and said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

EPILOGUE

On May 2, 1997, a national memorial to Franklin Roosevelt was unveiled on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It covered seven and a half acres not far from the memorials to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

The visitors saw not a towering obelisk, like Washington’s, or a temple, like Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s. It was a granite park that led them through a series of tableaux in which running water was the central element, from a stream to a roaring waterfall. There were statues of ordinary people waiting in a Great Depression breadline. There was a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, in tribute to the world-sized role she played as First Lady of the United States, political activist, and advocate for peace.

And there was, of course, a statue of FDR. The figure was seated with a cape swirled around his legs and chair, gazing with a hero’s vision at the far horizon.

There was a lot of arguing about that statue.

Unlike in FDR’s own time, the disabled people of the United States—who in the 1990s numbered nearly fifty million—had found their voices and organized to claim their rights, many of which had been guaranteed by federal law in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. They were certainly not of a single mind about the statue of FDR. But many of them believed it was wrong to shroud the truth—that he had depended on crutches, braces, and a wheelchair—under a flowing cape.

An advocate for disability rights named Yvonne Duffy, who had been struck by polio when she was two years old, spoke for many when she wrote: “I remember my mother telling me, straightening her back proudly as she spoke, that polio had never stopped Franklin Roosevelt from becoming president. Her message was clear: Even a child with a disability like mine could aspire to be president … Times have changed in the 50 years since FDR’s death … No longer is a physical impairment viewed as something shameful, something to be hidden. But you wouldn’t know this from the actions of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Commission … They would make my mother’s inspirational story to a disabled child a pathetic lie.”

Duffy and many others demanded a change. Roosevelt must be depicted as an obviously disabled man, they said.

On the other side of the argument were people thinking about what FDR himself would have wanted. David B. Roosevelt, one of Elliott’s children, said those who argued for a visible wheelchair were trying to rewrite history. “My grandfather guarded his condition closely,” Roosevelt wrote. “FDR was most certainly not shamed by his condition. He realized, however, that the difficult decisions he made surrounding the Great Depression, World War II and other events of the times required a vigorous leader who inspired faith in the people he served. Unfortunately, during the 1930s and ’40s this nation was not as enlightened concerning people with disabilities as it is today.” (Not all Roosevelts agreed. Anne Roosevelt, a daughter of John’s, remarked, “We should portray him as he was, and as he was, he wore braces.”)

The advocates’ reply to David Roosevelt was that FDR, had he lived in the 1990s, would have embraced the modern disabilities movement and endorsed the inclusion of a wheelchair in his memorial. (Not many remembered that when Roosevelt, as president, was asked about any future monument to his memory, he said he would like there to be a simple stone block the size of his desk, engraved with his name and installed by the National Archives Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. His wish was granted in 1965.)

In the end, the disability advocates got their way—mostly. The original statue of FDR in the concealing cape remained. But in 2001 a second statue was added to the memorial, this one showing him in glasses and his favorite slouch hat, casually seated in his simple wheelchair.

These heated discussions had to do with how FDR was portrayed. They tended to overlook the larger matter of why he had been portrayed in a national memorial in the first place, and on a scale that placed him at the level of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln in the nation’s memory.

The memorial was built because Roosevelt was beyond a doubt the most influential president of his century.

In the early months of his first term in office, known ever after simply as the “Hundred Days,” he won Congress’s agreement to a blizzard of innovative programs designed to heal the